Alice set for new Beijing adventure

Museum marks centennial of novel's Chinese version as it delves into the world of Lewis Carroll's work, Lin Qi reports.

In 1922, the first Chinese version of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published. The critically acclaimed translation by Chinese-American linguist Zhao Yuanren enabled readers to embark upon the fantastical and bizarre journey undertaken by Alice down the rabbit hole in her garden.

And now, Alice and those strange characters she encountered on her adventures have come back to Beijing to celebrate the centennial of the novel's Chinese translation.

Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, an exhibition staged last year at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, explores the evolution of Carroll's fiction-and its sequence Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There-since it first rolled off the press more than 150 years ago, from manuscripts to a beloved piece of English children's literature and afterward, a global cultural phenomenon.

The exhibition reaches Beijing on the first stop of its world tour, bringing to the U2 by the UCCA museum some 300 objects broken into five sections to explore the origin and development of Alice's adventures, as well as the fanfare this literary icon has created in the different dimensions of pop culture.